1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to computer-assisted medical procedures. More particularly, this invention relates to techniques for preventing disruptive computer events during the performance of computer-assisted medical procedures.
2. Description of the Related Art
The meanings of certain acronyms and abbreviations used herein are given in Table 1.
TABLE 1Acronyms and AbbreviationsCDCompact DiscCPUCentral Processing UnitCTComputed TomographyMRMagnetic ResonanceUSBUniversal Serial Bus
Most modern general purpose computers and many special purpose computers are controlled by multitasking operating systems. Versions of Unix® and Microsoft Windows® operating systems are widely used examples. The task schedulers of these operating systems may concurrently queue dozens of processes having differing priorities. Some system or kernel processes may generate interrupts asynchronously or perform other actions that preempt various computer resources to the detriment of other processes executing at the application level. Examples of such processes include standard utilities, networking activities, firewall and antivirus functions.
Attempts to alter existing event-driven operating system priorities are known. For example U.S. Pat. No. 6,931,553, issued to Plante et al. discloses selectively enabling general purpose events that would wake a machine from a sleep state, only when the operating system wants particular devices associated with the wake to be able to notify the operating system that a wake event has occurred.
Another approach is taken in U.S. Pat. No. 7,451,454, issued to Chen et al. An event mechanism is implemented in a multiprocessor or hyper-threading computer architecture, allowing one physical or logical processor to engage in normal processing while directing special event operations to another physical or logical processor. In one embodiment, a timer is set and a polling function is called at the end of each of a plurality of time intervals. The polling function is performed by a first processor. If the polling function results in a positive result, the results of the polling function are processed with a second processor.